Le Pont Neuf (1901): Art, History and Details

Le Pont Neuf (1901) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Auguste Louis Lepère (French, 1849–1918).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Like Charles Meryon, Auguste Lepère was known for etchings of Paris. This work shows how bateaux-lavoirs (wash boats) changed over the course of a half century, as dissatisfaction grew about their unsanitariness and unattractiveness. In contrast to Meryon’s hectic scenes—in which laundresses lean out of open windows and stretch lines of laundry along the river’s paved banks—the boats appear here as orderly and uniform structures, closed so that the women working within were not visible to passersby.

Object facts

• Title: Le Pont Neuf
• Date: 1901
• Creator attribution: Auguste Louis Lepère (French, 1849–1918)
• Culture: France, early 20th Century
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching
• Dimensions: Image: 17.1 x 31 cm (6 3/4 x 12 3/16 in.); Sheet: 22.5 x 33.9 cm (8 7/8 x 13 3/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1987.190

Collection credit

Gift of Elizabeth Carroll Shearer in memory of Robert Lundie Shearer

Further reading listed by the museum

• Salsbury, Britany. Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.